Maybe I don’t like sci-fi settings as much as I thought I would. Exo One offers a series of majestic, desolate planetary landscapes to plunge, roll and glide through, but its dramatic environments and unusual traversing all sent chills down my spine.
I don’t think it’s understandable to describe Exo One as Christopher Nolan’s Tiny Wings. Nolan will appreciate this space-time-jumping journey because of its vast scale. Every planet you take is huge, and the best of them all have an equally lofty concept. In the early planets, this meant that they were meteorologically forbidden in a way: I glided through the waterworlds as they were hit by meteors, tumbling like a marble down the mountains. erupting fire, and plunge through lightning storms.
Meanwhile, the portable classic Tiny Wings are summoned by your spaceship and its unusual propulsion method. It has no engines, and instead manipulates gravity to alternately plunge downhill or hover in the air. The parallel use of these abilities will turn each surface of the world into a ski resort, and hitting the next ramp that’s just right in size Cairngorm will make you feel as if it’s shot straight at you. distance from Aberdeen to Dundee.
This scale is both the appeal of the game, and its drop point.
Regardless of the nature of the planet, your goal is mostly the same: reaching a white light from a distance shot into the sky will shoot you like a cannonball towards the next planet.
My first attempts to navigate in Exo One were clumsy. I chose the wrong time to drop and slide the slope I was aiming for, or stop the plunge too late and head back downhill toward the path I came from. It feels bad to constantly lose momentum and rebuild from scratch. You can make progress simply by pushing forward and rolling your silhouette steadily across the ground, but doing so is like taking off your skateboard and choosing to walk.
Then after 30 minutes or so of clumsy progress, success! I found the rhythm of the terrain, started falling in style, and quickly covered great distances with great speed. At first, it was exhilarating as I skated through the mountains and threw my ship so high that it pierced the clouds.
“Overcoming challenges, tourism is the core attraction of Exo One”
However, my quick gliding through the game’s learning curve also leaves the Exo One stripped of all collisions, in every sense. While hovering on the floor felt awkward and slow, gliding through the air felt almost nothing. There is no sense of speed when you are at high altitude. Exo One wisely forces you to step back – a sharp drop will recharge your glide – but once this move becomes trivial to perform, doing it repeatedly shows the difference between planets are mostly aesthetic.
Whether it’s water, lava or snow, mountains or floating islands in the sky, I’ve done the same things over and over in Exo One. I will rush downhill to increase my speed and charge my ship; switch to gliding on slopes until the charge runs out; and then back downhill to start the process again. And one more time. And one more time. Then go to a new planet and do it more.
Tiny Wings is a score attack game designed around short play. Exo One is a single story experience and it requires players to be able to progress continuously. Overcoming most challenges, that makes tourism attractive at its core – a galaxy Abzû good science Rez Infinite, the game that I love – but after a few minutes on each new world, even the visual impact of Exo One wears off. Sometimes I feel like a Tribe player who has gone AWOL in procedural infinity beyond the borders of the real level.
There are several attempts to reintroduce the challenge. There are optional collections that extend your maximum charging time, which is good. In some worlds, you’re encouraged to fly through tunnels and smaller tunnels, but it’s never fun to spin with momentum and spin wide in tight spaces. A later planet completely limits some of your ship’s abilities, but it makes navigating undulating terrain more challenging than more enjoyable.
At the most geographically ambitious levels of the game, Exo One’s camera allows that to happen. It likes to get so close that your ship whirls around not knowing which way to face, and in moments where the distance is so vast that there’s no landscape to use as a frame of reference, it’s hard to Know how to get your ship back under control.
At this point, Exo One’s last hope of staying motivated is the story that ties your journey together. Told through dialogue and still images that occasionally flicker across the screen, it successfully amplifies the sense of insignificance and alienation conveyed by the game’s cosmic scale – but it’s too simplistic or too vague to be interesting.
Aside from its success as a mood piece, it’s tempting to recommend Exo One just for its scenery. As a machine for making desktop wallpapers or screensavers, it is first rate. Some of you, I feel, will like it just for this. But like I said above, I probably don’t like sci-fi settings as much as I thought. Long before Exo One’s short 3 hours came to a conclusion, I just wanted it to be Exo Done.
